Inactions

Actions, as in Vienna Actionism, a term of historical importance in the history of performance art, but there is another course, a strategy that leaves openings, searches for a foothold or gap in the air, waits patiently, dwells in silence and withholding, empties itself into a space, slow as moss.  

These inactions encounter the ghostly imprint of places, their implacability, touching lightly at the edges of deep time. Stillness resonates, the weathering of skin as an unheard movement. Cryptic locomotion is movement as stealth, barely present, faint as edge tones. A lizard is compacted strength, a tongue, a tail, flickering, as of refracted light or the beating of close frequencies; of bats quivering, hanging enclosed, like darkness. 

(think of archival references, the drowning scene in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, the photographs of Francesca Woodman and Bill Brandt, bodies silent in spaces, or Clarice Lispector's The Apple In the Dark, body in extremis, barely distinguishable from its placing in night, desert or time)